Instead, she was here, shifting uncomfortable as they reached the north edge of Tupper Lake. Ansel’s truck stopped briefly at a gas station, then pulled up in front of a residence: a house painted a bright bubblegum blue. As Ansel lumbered from his car, Saffy squinted closer.
It was a restaurant. A laminated menu sat in the window, and a little wrought-iron sign hung over the door, rusted red, barely visible.
The Blue House.
It was nearly noon, and Saffy desperately needed to pee. She shouldn’t do this—it wasn’t smart, it wasn’t reasonable, and it certainly wasn’t good police work. But Saffy knew that she would follow him inside. She had staked her career on this concept, had proven herself right time and again: Everyone had secrets. Everyone lived in some form of hiding.
Saffy, too. She was seeing a therapist now, a woman named Laurie who worked from the second floor of an outdated office building. Laurie kept a box of tissues on the coffee table and a soothing collection of potted plants on the windowsill. They talked mostly about Saffy’s work, the horrors she witnessed every day: women beaten to death in their beds, children starved and chained in basements, overdose after overdose. Often, Saffy tried to change the subject, to discuss her new home renovation—she’d recently gutted her kitchen, with Kristen’s help—or her dating woes, the men who flitted in and out of her life, rarely holding her interest. She told Laurie about the folder of recipes she kept propped on the kitchen windowsill; Rajasthani dishes she’d spent hours Googling, laal maas and dal baati, ordering the ingredients to be delivered in the mail. But Laurie always circled back to the job. The atrocity of Saffy’s every day. What draws you to this work? Laurie liked to ask, her brow crinkled with good intention. What part of your child self feels at home in trauma?
Saffy always fought the urge to roll her eyes. She considered quitting therapy altogether, but she wanted to set an example for her young investigators, men who hid behind the manufactured masculinity of police work, making halfhearted gay jokes as they spit their tobacco. She was captain now. She knew how carefully they watched her.
As Saffy studied Ansel, his boots thunking up the stairs toward the Blue House, she remembered Laurie’s words, the wise, infuriating tilt of Laurie’s head. What about your child self?
Fine, Saffy thought, acquiescing, as Ansel approached the door. What about her?
Saffy still missed that little girl sometimes, alert in the top bunk as midnight rolled toward morning. Her desire had been so clear: she had wanted her mother back from the dead. She’d wondered so constantly about her father, he’d taken on a mythical sort of importance, like justice or truth, forever unknowable. Though her childhood was steeped in grief, things had been easier at Miss Gemma’s, when she knew exactly what to wish for, when that simple wanting ran beneath everything, a constant streaming current.
But it was gone now. Saffy had shed that sense of longing, had shrugged it off during her rebel teen years or her bumbling twenties. She had replaced it with case reports filed at three in the morning, backroom interrogations that made her suspects cry, seven-hour drives just to interview a witness. Saffy examined the back of Ansel’s head as he disappeared into the restaurant. She wondered what of that yearning he’d managed to shed—or maybe, more importantly, what he had held on to.
*
The interior of the Blue House was homey and bright, dingy and decaying, a family establishment that had clearly passed its peak. A tinkle came from the bell above the door, announcing Saffy’s entrance, inciting a minor pang of panic—this was a bad idea. She should drive home, catch the pizza dinner in Kristen’s backyard, a tradition after soccer games.
But it also felt necessary. Surprisingly right.
“What can I do for you?”
The woman at the hostess stand was smiling warmly. Her hair frizzed behind an elastic headband and her apron was stained with ketchup and grease. Mid-thirties, Saffy guessed. A name tag had been pinned, lopsided, to her apron. Rachel.
“Just an iced tea,” Saffy said, nodding toward the bar. She tried to sound more like herself and less like police, though the line between the two had determinedly blurred. “And where can I find your bathroom?”
As Rachel pointed her toward the back of the restaurant, Saffy scanned quickly for Ansel. It didn’t take long. He sat at a table by the window, in a rickety chair that faced a young girl. A teenager. Her hair was braided and flung over one shoulder—she looked shy, nervous.
When Saffy reached the bathroom, she locked the door, breathing through the unfamiliar sensation. Terror, new and sharp. With her underwear around her knees, Saffy exhaled into her palms, bleach and urine and fried food engulfing her in a noxious cloud. She felt foolish, paranoid. But as Saffy ran the tap water hot, rinsed her trembling hands, she could not unsee it. The longing in Ansel’s gaze. That girl was young. Too young.